The Recruitment Exercise Activity - Essay Example

In this paper, I have reflected upon my experience of participating in two group exercises with given situations and time frames; the cave rescue activity, and the recruitment exercise activity. I have discussed my behavior during both activities in light of different theories of teamwork and conflict resolution and have shared how I dealt with the challenges we experienced during the exercises. I have also discussed how the activities helped me develop as a group member.

Tuckman proposed a model that recognizes the fact that groups are not functional or fully formed when they form. The groups propagate through a set of defined stages namely forming, storming, norming, and performing, and gradually become task-focused. The following graph illustrates Tuckman’s teamwork theory by showing the link between task focus and group relationships. In any group activity, optimal productivity is reached after the development of the relationships among the group members.
• STAR Team Model
The STAR team model suggests that to optimize the group’s productivity, the group leader should place equal emphasis on the development of the group members’ strengths and the development of good relationships among them. The STAR team model provides content and substance to the situation, conditions, and stages of teamwork as shown in the figure below:

STAR Team Model (The Happy Manager, 2012b).

Analysis
One thing that I learned from the exercises was that more conflicts were happening at the start than near the end of the exercises. The fundamental reason behind this was that the group members had started to understand one another’s personalities and behaviors and their adaptability had increased. “Research in human team performance suggests that experienced teams develop a shared understanding or shared mental model utilized to coordinate behaviors by anticipating and predicting each other's needs and adapting to task demands” (Sycara and Sukthankar, 2006, p. 2). All models discussed in this paper including John Burton’s Human Needs Model, Tuckman’s Teamwork Theory, and the STAR Team Model commonly emphasize the development of relationships among the group members as a pre-requisite for achieving optimal productivity in the group exercises, though the development of group members’ skills as well as their relationships requires time. “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success” (Henry Ford cited in Zuck, 1997, p. 375). Teamwork helps people understand one another in the best way. By the team we were done with both the exercises, we had not only finished our tasks but had also known one another much better than we did before.

A very useful learning that I gained in this exercise was how to resolve conflicts. I have learned that it is primarily one’s preferences that determine the extent to which one would be able to execute the tasks without conflicts. People who prefer their ego over the task’s goal are more likely to enter into dysfunctional conflicts whereas people for whom the goal is more important are more cooperative and compromising.

Conclusion
This was one of the most useful and informative exercises that we have undergone in this course. In the contemporary age, professionals are frequently required to work as part of a team. While conflicts in group tasks are inevitable, the chances of conflicts increase further, particularly when the teams are composed of people from diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, religions, and cultures. Both the exercises that we were required to execute were very sensitive and had a lot of room for conflicts of opinion among the group members. Obviously, for certain group members, elders were more respectable and deserved to be rescued first whereas others considered that the youngsters deserved to live more. Likewise, in the recruitment exercise, different group members considered different skills and competencies in the employees more important than others. On top of that, we had to make the decisions in such a limited time frame that there we could not risk getting into unnecessary details of such things as dysfunctional conflicts. Most of the time, we reached decisions through voting as satisfying everybody every time was simply not possible.

In both exercises, I maintained a highly cooperative behavior. For me, timely execution of the tasks and getting graded accordingly was the most important. At times, it was indeed difficult to do since one of my group members always had the polar opposite opinion of mine. It seemed like he had decided that whatever I would say, he would contradict that. Despite that, rather than getting into unnecessary arguments with him, I simply said my opinion and told him in what potential ways was it right and how following it would benefit the whole group. Although it was a challenging task to make informed decisions in such complex settings in the limited time that we were provided with, the stress we took ultimately inculcated sound group skills in us that would help us a lot both in our academic and professional careers. Read More